chenda wrote: ↑Wed Oct 06, 2021 12:21 pm
But I wonder if there's just far too much intellectuallisation going on.
That's a good question. My
thesis is that there's not nearly enough intellectualization going on given the complexity of the problem. Underthinking is a structural problem for the meta-crisis in the same sense that unemployment can be structural. We've too many humans who are not capable of thinking once they're out of their box.
The meta-crisis absolutely exceeds what's possible with human "tribal hardware" like emotional intuition and social mimicry.
Even language is not there. English, for example, is limited to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspective. English grammar has he/she/it and past, present, future tenses. IOW, English makes it possible to talk in a slightly expanded 3rd person perspective. Nothing more.
For example, it's possible to talk about "how I see you and you see me" (second person) or "how I see her seeing him" (third person) in respectively the past, the present, and the future. Adding time allows for a slightly expanded third person perspective, e.g. "I saw him talking to her" vs "I see him talking to her" being the same structure in two different times, thus seeing the same relation but at two different times. Hold onto that image (you seeing two people talking two different times).
However, there's no way grammatical way of communicating higher person perspectives. These structures do not exist in English. As such they are not natural. They become intellectualized. For example, "my seeing her talking to him was colored by me being in a happy mood" vs "my seeing her talking was colored by me being in a sad mood". My mood determines what I see. Here there's a fourth person observer realizing that my third person perspective is affected my mood.
There's no simple grammar that provides introspective context in the same way that grammar does exist for differentiating perspective in time. Fortunately we can still communicate this but we have to rely on sentence constructs. There's no way to to it with mere grammar anymore.
So if you're intellectualizing this, you can as a short-hand just say that someone who realizes that there perspective is set by circumstances is "Kegan4" whereas anyone who always brings their own perspective along is "Kegan3". In particular, if intellectualizing it's possible to say that your perspective is also set by value-constructs, e.g. "Blue vMEME me saw him talking to her as being unfaithful" but "Orange vMEME me saw him talking to her as a simple professional conversation". Kegan4 is aware that it's really the adopted/constructed value-set that's doing the judging. Kegan3 is blind to this. Literally blind. It's not that Kegan3 is not aware of their own values but that they're not capable of seeing their own values from outside because the mental instruments for doing so are just not there. The epistemic tools are missing. (Similar to how a baby is not able to see himself as being a separate entity from his mother.) IOW, Kegan3 analyses all values in terms of their own values and cognitive framework (e.g. logic MBTI T-types or feeling MBTI F-types) including their own (which of course is the only one true set of values---if anyone else disagrees they're misguided, failing in their logic, ... ). A simpler example might be how a German is not aware of what constitutes Germanhood until he has lived outside of Germany for quite a while observing Germany (and his own Germanhood) from afar and from a different context. IOW SD is just a map of [mostly] different Kegan3 values (Tier1).
However, in order to generate alternatives one needs to step out of the 4th order perspective in which there are different
given perspectives and realize that perspectives are actually not god-given (countable from beige to green) but rather constructed in a process of growing up and being raised in a particular culture. This allows the possibility of constructing new cultures rather than just, say, traveling and observing. Realizing that perspectives can be constructed on the fly---having a perspective on perspectives---is Kegan5.
If all this was part of the grammar rather than an intellectual exercise with weird diagrams, I doubt we would have a meta-crisis. To grok the magnitude of the problem it would be as if all English speakers were limited to first-person language. Imagine the communication issues of expressing relations between other people. Similarly, we're currently suffering from our language limit of communicating aperspectival point of views.